patches for tools?

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Chakkaradeep C C wrote:
> hi all,
>> after using lfs for a while....am very much pleased with its
> performance.now i want to explore things...mainly bug fixes for each
> version of the tool........is the patches provided with lfs (am using
> lfs 6.0) makes the bugs fixed in that tool?.....or is that i can find
> patches and patch them?...if so where can i find patches for the
> tools,especially binutils,gcc and glibc.....this doubt arised in me
> when i viewed some of the RPM SPEC files given by some major
> distributions...gcc spec file had nearly 100 pathces and most of them
> were pertaining to test failures which in lfs do occur.and so did
> binutils and glibc SPEC files.now at this juncture,how would lfs tell
> that it's tools are bug free and it wont encounter any problems at
> later stage?
>
Heh, last time I looked at an SRPM was for X.org, just after the gentoo
patches picked up a ton of stuff from RedHat - from memory, many of
those patches were very old and for very obscure hardware (and none of
them solved my problem). But, if the big-name rpm distros are now
mostly patching to fix test failures, I guess that is a good sign.
BUT, what you have to remember is that _toolchain_ problems are often
specific to particular binutils/gcc/glibc/kernel combinations (e.g.
glibc-2.3.4 nptl started to fail with the pipe [?] changes in kernel
2.6.11, I believe), and undoubtedly some distros build far more
languages than just c,c++ in gcc and may hit bugs most of us never see.
> binutils,gcc,glibc being the major tools,i think i would gather the
> important patches for them,but am failing each time because am not
> able to find a website giving out patch files :-(..
>> i would be very happy if people could help me..
>
And now the big problem: you've got the situation slightly twisted
around - the RPM distros provide patches in their SRPMs, there is not
generally a standard set of patches that distros apply :) So, for each
issue that you care about and for which there is a known fix, you have
to extract a relevant patch (or, sometimes, upgrade to a later version).
Once you've done that and confirmed that it fixes the problem, please
submit each patch to patches.linuxfromscratch.org :) You might also
want to look at debian, ubuntu, [ .diff.gz in their download sites ] and
even gentoo [ who sometimes have patches in the 'files' sub-directories
of the individual packages on their mirrors ].
You will often need to edit distro patches to strip out stuff that
doesn't affect us - particularly for debian patches - and you may need
to rediff it so that we can apply it with our standard -p1 patch option.
But, how many failures are you seeing ? These days, binutils should be
ok on _most_ architectures, gcc usually has a handful of different
failures in each release/arch, and released glibc should only have a
couple of failures. Certainly, fedora tends to pick up on gcc bugfixes
a bit ssooner than most other distros, but these aren't always related
to test failures, and anyway fedora is often bleeding-edge.
Ken
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce